To Discipline or Not to Discipline

With its twenty-six short essays, The Renewal of Cultural Studies presents a reviewer with a nigh insurmountable task of complex reader—or rather reviewer—response. The usual options available for managing such a task would be to give at least a cursory account of many of the essays, or else to be highly selective, perhaps designating the strongest examples in the collection or glancing at the weaker ones. Here I elect the different, experimental route, of a certain triage not based on an essay's quality or survival likelihood, but rather in terms of the standards set forth initially by the editor himself. To do so, I will draw, as I will explain shortly, on an image and distinction from Walter Benjamin, in a way roughly transferable to this volume of generally strong essays. I attempt inclusiveness, but will frame short descriptions within a consideration of this collection's stated purpose and standards. The categories I use will not be as much evaluative as descriptive, although a kind of political evaluation may be present. Some less strong essays may in this procedure achieve the collection's goal better than some stronger or more interesting ones.

The goals are set forth forcefully in Paul Smith's valuable introductory essay, with its clear-headed, sometimes provocative position about the redirection of cultural studies, analyzing an errancy that starts at the beginning—the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Because the Birmingham Group, Smith contends, emphasized the loose and open nature of cultural studies, and, moreover, because it did this in the name of a "largely unspecified 'political' or 'resistant' mission, the field was "absolved from elementary intellectual tasks and obligations" (2), and especially influenced American cultural studies in this way. With this theoretical insufficiency at its origin, it developed, as if from a faulty premise, into a field whose ideas are now "out of date," "endlessly repeating" the question, "What is cultural studies?" (3)

Smith argues instead that the proper question now is decidedly different: "What can and should cultural studies be doing now?" (3), although it might be countered that his question has always been implicit or explicit in most of the auto-critiques attempting to define this sometimes amorphous field. What Smith endeavors to achieve both for the field and the anthology is an increase of methodological coherence and consistency, a need for "identifying both the procedures and the objects that cultural studies will take on and that it will work with consistently and foundationally" (2). This somewhat formal hope colors Smith's side of the engaging dialogue with Andrew Ross that concludes his book, as Ross, whose practice is to send students into communities for projects, privileges work more "people-based" than theoretical, favoring a "research question" over a pre-determined means for answering it, and viewing scholarly production as "politically useful knowledge" (244). It remains to be seen, however, whether Smith's motivating question requires an answer, or whether, as the dialogue itself suggests, it will predictably be answered in multiple, if not "loose" and open-natured ways, whatever that means. Less convincing is when Smith goes beyond his call for more "political economy," with which I am in full agreement. His call for a necessity to identify the "objects" cultural studies takes on, looks less convincing, absent a strategy for getting beyond even the heterogeneity represented by this collection. From my own perspective, moreover, I note that in practice this might leave out valuable areas, such as early modern cultural studies, as the collection itself does.

Asking what cultural studies can and should do, returns this analysis to the image from Benjamin that may provide useful categories of distinction for these essays, helping the reviewing process if not the field itself. Viewing social relations as if in a kind of arena, Benjamin distinguishes the upholding of banners within the arena from the construction of the arena itself. To this distinction he draws the analogy of politics and ideology—the former as the struggles between or raising up of banners in an arena already set up to structure the conflict, the latter as...